I have no business thinking that I could just cut and run. If I ever tried that, David would send Branko to my parents’ home. That’s the deal. So maybe the trick is to get rid of David and Branko. Except I don’t think I could kill David and Branko. They would smell it on me the second I walked in the room. I could go find Mom and Dad and we could all run away together. I could make their lives worse than they already are. I could go to New York, find the money that started it all, the 4 million dollars. Except I have no idea where that money is. Tim hid that money. Hid it for safekeeping, to keep it safe for me. That was right before I killed him. I thought he’d taken the money for himself. How could I have known what a friend I had.

I could die. I could peel off a strip of this gaff tape, pry a shard of glass from the bent frame of the medicine cabinet door and start slashing my wrists. Just fall to the floor in here and bleed. But David has closed that door as well. He closed it the day we met when he spelled out our contract. My parents live, and I work for him for life. And I don’t get to decide when that life is over.

And so here I am again.

Thinking.

Well, I know how to stop that.

I peel open the Ziploc that has the downs in it. I fumble through the bottles looking for something I haven’t taken too much of lately, something that will work. The Vics took the edge off the pain in my face back at the motel and helped deal with the shakes I had, but I need something for my head now. I pop the cap on a bottle of Demerol, toss one in my mouth and swallow.

I put the bags back in the cabinet and close the door. I look at the mess of black tape, the occasional glimmer of fractured mirror peeking out. I pick at a loose end of tape and start to tease it away. It comes off, a few slivers of broken glass stuck to the back. I see my right eye and the patch of scar reflected back at me in mosaic. My face pulses once, twice, and I press the tape back down.

THE APARTMENT IS shitty, but it’s still a step up from the Budget Suites of America. That was grim. A pay-by-the-week chain motel at the ass end of Las Vegas Boulevard. Half the tenants at the Suites were families, pulled to Vegas by stories of abundant employment and cheap housing, crammed into one bedroom. The other half were the families that had already crapped out and were trying to scrape together enough to get out. The Budget Suites, serving as the mouth and ass of Las Vegas. That was the first place David stuck me after the bandages came off. After the butcher he hired to give me a new look got done busting all the bones in my face and moving them around and slicing the skin and sewing it back up so it fit. Sort of.

It’s not like I look like Frankenstein’s monster or anything. He changed the shape of my forehead, moved my hairline back, broke my cheekbones and pushed them up, filed the point of my jaw down, flattened my nose and thinned my lips. It’s not even that the face looks bad. Probably would have been a good job all the way around if I hadn’t had those burns when he operated.

Turns out that performing impromptu plastic surgery on a man with a severly scalded face is a bad call. Things never quite healed as they should have. If I cover the outer half of my right eye with the palm of my hand it just about perfectly eclipses the scar. A patch of dead, white, wrinkled skin, its circumference cutting across my eyebrow, temple and cheekbone. The scar is a problem, not because it makes it hard to pick up chicks, but because it makes me easy to remember. The scar means David can’t use me on many jobs. Only the kind that involve people you don’t have to worry about identifying you later. Hard guys who fight back but know to keep their mouths shut when they come out on the losing side. Or people who just aren’t ever going to talk to anyone again. I’ve met some of those people.

The scar is also why David stuck me in the Budget Suites. The Suites was perfect. Nobody looks at anyone at the Suites. Head down, mind your own business, that’s the rules. Besides, there are so many scarred and gimped losers crawling in and out of that place, no one notices one more hacked-up face.

Anyway, the scar’s not the issue. The issue is the nerve damage, it’s the job the surgeon did when he reset the bones after he broke up my face. He didn’t do a good job. Something in there is fucked up. Most of the time it hurts like a bad headache, but in your face. Sometimes it’s worse. Like when a big guy crams my face into a mirror or something. So I take pills. I take them for the pain in my face. But I also take them to keep me from picking at the tape on that medicine cabinet mirror.

I sat on my shelf at the Suites and ate the pills I scored off one of the dealers who lived there. Some of the pills took care of the pain, some of the pills erased the nightmares from my sleep, and some of the pills got me in the car with Branko when he’d come by to pick me up.

We’d drive someplace where someone who was used to being the scariest dude around needed to be scared. And Branko would send me through the door first. And it was fine. The pills made it fine. I didn’t hurt, I didn’t care. And that was fine. Then the pills stopped working so good. Now I have to take so many of the goddamn things that I’m usually a zombie by the time I go in. Branko tries to sic me on some guy and there I am, leaning against the wall with little ropes of drool hanging out the corner of my mouth.

David doesn’t like that.

David thought I had all-star potential. I was gonna be his ghost, the guy no one knows about. The secret weapon in his organization. And no one does know. Just him and Branko. I’m the gun he can pull and wave around, the gun that nobody knows he has. He thought I’d serve my apprenticeship with Branko and then I’d be able to go it alone. When he found out that I’d moved from Xanax and Vics to Demerol and OxyContin, he had me moved from the Suites and into this shithole in North LV. I just keep dropping by the Suites to score. I’d like to think David and Branko don’t know I’m still popping the heavy stuff, but they aren’t stupid. I’m the only stupid one around here.

And now I’ve started getting sent on the shitty jobs, jobs that are a little more visible. The kind of jobs Branko usually arranges with some guy they fly in from out of town. It’s starting to feel like maybe David is less and less concerned about having me around for the long term. Like maybe he just wants to get some value back on his investment before he cuts me.

I try to care about that. I try to care whether I live or die. Because that has an awful lot to do with whether my folks live or die. But the Demerol’s kicking in now and I’m starting to stop caring about anything at all. Just the way I like it.

I go back into the living room. I flop on the couch and the Demerol makes it a slow-motion tumble from a rooftop into one of those huge air bags stuntmen use. I watch my hand pick up the stereo remote. I flick through the CDs in the changer until I find some Elvis Costello, and then song-hop, listening to the opening notes of each track until I find one that suits my mood: semi-suicidal, but chemically numbed. “Shipbuilding” seems to have it covered.

This is good. This is just fine. More to the point, this is as good as it gets for me anymore. Demerol, some tunes, and the hope of dreamless sleep. That’s the mountaintop for me. How the mighty have fallen.

Used to be the mountain was swinging a bat, smacking a ball, watching it fly away, knowing it was a sure hit, and sprinting around the bases. That was a long time ago. That was another world. Baseball. I haven’t played baseball since I was a kid. Shit, I can’t even watch baseball. A bottle of Demerol wouldn’t get me high enough to handle a ball game. I try to watch a baseball game anymore and I just end up rocking back and forth on the couch, arms wrapped around myself, whining.